Now that I’m mostly over my flu, I thought it would be a good time to talk about viral websites. As I’m sure you’re aware, viral websites are sites that owe their popularity to viral marketing, without which they would have undoubtedly failed. Sites like the Million Dollar Homepage and One Red Paperclip fall into this category. Well, here’s a new one that’s going to need that viral boost, because I can’t see it succeeding otherwise.

A lot of text

The Longest Link Page is not quite what it claims yet. As of this writing, it only has eight links.

As for what the page is trying to be, it’s pretty self explanatory. For only $1, you can buy a three word link that will stay on that page forever. You can also have your link be bold, italicized, colored, underlined, or all of the above for $3. For another $5/month, you can have your link receive ‘featured’ status. After that? Well, you have three words in a narrow column of other groups of three words, stretching downward to infinity.

Will it go viral?

I highly doubt it. While it’s just as gimmicky as pixel ads and paid wikis, those two things offer much more bang for your buck. For example, let’s say you had to choose between spending a dollar at One Buck Wiki or Longest Link Page. With OBW, you get an entire page to do whatever you want with, allowing you to potentially add more than three words. If you’re feeling bold, you can even add pictures or advertisements! With Longest Link Page, you get three words and some font variations. Take your time, I’m sure it’s a difficult choice.

While you’re thinking about it, remember that there’s another paid wiki out there where you can buy pages for a quarter. So, would you prefer four pages or three words? Keep thinking.

Fatal flaws

Why would I want to put my link on this page at all? The longer it gets, the less of a chance there is that anyone will actually see it. The only reason to buy would be if the page had a high Google Pagerank, which isn’t going to happen. As soon as somebody over at Google notices that the only content on this page is paid text links, it’s going to get slapped down to PR0. So, if you’re keeping tally, your $1 has bought your three words that nobody will ever see and a useless backlink. Whoohoo.

The bottom line

Is it gimmicky? Yes. Is it cheap? Sure. Will it ever go anywhere? I doubt it. I just can’t see why anybody would try to monetize a wall of text.

Ok, I had this post all written out and I was pretty happy with it, but then I found this: LinkCheap. Yup, it’s the exact same thing, except with a huge number of sold links, and it’s claiming PR4. Then there’s the World’s Longest Homepage, which looks much nicer than the Longest Link Page, and is also the exact same thing. Looks like I need to do better research in the future. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of these types of pages before.

In any case, Longest Link Page is now being added to my ‘Copy Cats’ category.

2 Responses to “Longest Link Page”

thanks for the linkback I got this warm, fuzzy feeling when I saw the post. I was wondering if you could change it to link to my other blog though- it just started and I’m trying to get more promotion for it.

One interesting thing about these pages is that the earlier you buy, the higher up your link would be…and the better chance of it getting clicked. Say some person comes to one of those pages just to see what the fuss is all about. They’d see the first ten or twenty at the top, maybe scroll some randomly, and then that’s it. So those first couple actually get a decent spot, but the rest…ehh.

I have an idea for a variation on the linkwall thing, actually. A video wall. It’s the only natural progression. You start with text, go to pixels/images, and then end with moving picture. Say you charge a $5 base fee and then 1cent per second, up to ten minutes of video. Videos are 200×120ish in dimension, or even smaller.

Hey, I reckon PageHole (pagehole.com) may have been the first of it’s kind.

I actually bought a link on PH a few years ago when it first started, but after so many started popping up, it was just worthless. Who wants to buy a text link on a site that will get no PR, and most likely no traffic.